Shell Argues CO2 Needs to Be Pumped Underground

Officials from the large oil company Shell have announced recently that the enterprise believes the best way of getting rid of excess carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is to capture it and store it underground. According to the numbers the representatives have supplied, this step in the technological process, applied to fossil fuel-powered electrical installations, could cut the amounts of CO2 pumped in the air each year by a whopping 40 percent. The proposal argues that carbon capture and storage (CCS) procedures need to be implemented at the most basic level, as in at the furnace of polluting installations, Reuters reports.

“CCS is probably the largest source of potential carbon reduction for the next 30 years, and a way to deal with 30 to 40 percent of [worldwide] emissions,” Shell's Senior Advisor for Environmental Affairs and Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Kimberly Corley, explained. In a press conference he had with reporters on Thursday, Shell CEO Jeroen van de Veer added that, “We think (the scheme) is one of the few technologies that has the potential to become very big” in the future.

Basically, in CCS, oil pumps are outfitted with a special equipment, which allows them to capture carbon dioxide and forcefully insert the greenhouse gas into oil or natural gas reservoirs. As new gas is added, the pressure inside the chambers increases, and extracting the oil becomes a lot easier. Under these circumstances, the pumps in themselves pollute less, because they require a lot less energy to pull out the precious resource than they would otherwise.

Shell also has ulterior motives for announcing these storing options, analysts say. If the company manages to set up a large network of carbon-storing facilities, then it could easily get rid of its own excess carbon dioxide, as well as help other companies do the same. In addition to the direct revenues it would get from other enterprises, the Dutch/British multinational would also be able to benefit from carbon trading schemes, which would allow it to sell permits it hasn't used in a year.

Shell's Climate Advisor, David Hone, shared that aggressively pursuing the deployment of carbon capture and storage technology could result in Shell and other companies generating as much as $50 billion in revenue by 2025. But the main obstacle for introducing CCS devices at power plants is the fact that they are still prohibitively expensive. It's estimated that projects revolving around implementing the system would cost about $2 billion for each million ton a year of emissions. And Shell's CEO told that the US alone emitted about seven billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. “No one knows the cost if you start to do it on a large scale,” he concluded.